By Isaac Stone FishIsaac Stone Fish is Asia Editor. A Mandarin speaker, he lived in China for seven years before moving to Washington DC. His articles have also appeared in the New York Times, the Economist, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, and he has appeared as a commentator on MSNBC, BBC, NPR, Al-Jazeera, and PRI, among others.

Last week, U.S.web hosting company Name.com received an emailordering them to stop unregister the domain of Boxun, a Chinese news portal run out of North Carolina. Boxun, which has the same retro, link-heavy feel as Craigslist or Drudge Report, serves as a clearinghouse of the rumor and intrigue circulating the web about Chinese elite politics. "We have our sources," says Watson Meng, a Duke University graduate from China who founded the website in 2000 and still runs it, supervising the editing and posting of an average of more than ten articles daily.

A source familiar with the matter forwarded me the original English-language email Name.com received: "Hello, due to a domain name of your platform: "boxun.com", serious damage to the interests of my company, now we hope you stop any services for this domain immediately…Please pay attention, we would began to attack in a few hours except satisfying our conditions. Please treasure your own commercial interests, if for any loss caused to you, please forgive!!!" [ellipsis mine, spelling and grammar same as in the original.]

After the email, Meng says Name.com was hit by a ferocious denial-of-service attack of "ten gigabytes" a second and Boxun found a new server. Name.com did not respond to a request for comment, and Meng didn’t say where the email was sent from.

By his counting, Meng’s website has been attacked dozens of times. Last January, with the Arab Spring gaining steam in the Middle East, Meng posted calls for a "Jasmine Revolution" in China from an anonymous group. Pro-Communist Party groups "were pretty hardcore about this," he said. "They put my family’s names online. That was the first time that happened." Meng grew up in a small county in rural Hebei province in the 1960s and 1970s, where his parents still live. During the Cultural Revolution, many urban youth were sent to villages across China. I asked if that was the case with him and he replied, "nope, we were always peasants." His father was a local functionary on the county’s science committee; his mother was a farmer. His family on the whole is supportive of his actions and he’s not worried about them. "The Cultural Revolution has already passed," he said. "There are not too many illegal things people can do to my family."

Meng thinks this web attack was specifically ordered by Zhou Yongkang, the ninth ranking member of the Politburo Standing Committee and ideological ally of Bo. Meng describes him as a "very strong person who runs the PSB, state security, or, well, don’t know if he runs anything anymore," though he thinks Zhou will keep his position until the next Party Congress this fall. In earlier Boxun posts, Meng has speculated that Bo and Zhou had been working together to overthrow Xi Jinping. "We believe Wang Lijun already told the U.S. Consulate that Bo Xilai had a plot to stop Xi Jinping’s rise" he said, citing "reliable sources."

Since Chinese official news outlets usually function as mouthpieces of the Communist Party, rather than trustworthy providers of fact or clearly sourced opinion, Chinese readers are comparatively more trusting of Weibo (microblogs), rumors, and sites like Boxun. Wang is currently looking into a 2002 crash of a flight from Beijing to Dalian, in which more than 100 people died. He thinks Bo orchestrated the crash to kill the wife of a political rival, who was carrying evidence that could have been harmful for the former powerbroker. "He’s done so many things to cover up this or cover up that," Wang said. He declined to elaborate on what proof he has for his latest claim and the scenario seems somewhat farfetched, but, like all of Boxun’s stories, it falls within the realm of possibility.

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Geoff Dyer <p>
Geoff Dyer writes
about U.S. foreign policy
for the Financial
Times in Washington. He was formerly the FT's Beijing bureau chief and is writing a book on China's new
global ambitions.
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Isaac Stone FishIsaac Stone Fish is Asia Editor. A Mandarin speaker, he lived in China for seven years before moving to Washington DC. His articles have also appeared in the New York Times, the Economist, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, and he has appeared as a commentator on MSNBC, BBC, NPR, Al-Jazeera, and PRI, among others. | The List |